With Vista barely a couple of months old, it seems that we won’t have to wait five years until Microsoft unveils the new OS’s replacement.
Ben Fathi, a corporate VP in Microsoft’s Windows Core Operating System Division, said in a media interview that the software company is drawing up plans to usurp the software with a follow-up codenamed ‘Vienna’.
Fathi said that work on Vista was delayed as the company got to grips with sorting out a number of security flaws in XP that prompted it to release Service Pack 2 in August 2004.
This work led to a significant number of features in the new operating system being dropped, such as a new filing system called WinFS. It is hoped the first service pack touted for Vista will add features, such as HD-DVD playback and Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), formerly known as Palladium. The service pack will also include bug fixes already reported in the software.
Fathi said that Longhorn (Vista’s codename) was put on the ‘back burner for a while’ as developers fixed problems.
‘Then when we came back to it, we realised that there were incremental things that we wanted to do, and significant improvements that we wanted to make in Vista that we couldn’t deliver in one release.’
He said that Vista had been delivered two and a half years after XP Service Pack 2 and expected the new OS to be ready in the same time frame, around 2009.
He said that one of the new features that might show up in Vienna was “Hypervisors”, adding virtualisation code into the OS itself. He added that the next few months would reveal more about the nascent OS.
Source – PC Pro
The number of workers in the UK who admitted they “hijack” the wireless connection of others has gone up from six per cent to 11 per cent over the last 12 months. Globally the figure is 12 per cent*, with big increases all over the world.
That’s among the findings of the second annual survey of remote working commissioned by networking giant Cisco Systems, which paints a picture of general (and increasing) slackness about IT security threats. The poll of 2,000 remote workers and IT pros from ten countries, including the UK, found that many remote workers were happy to risk opening suspicious emails and attachments. Nearly half (48 per cent) admitted to opening dodgy emails in the UK, something of a black spot for the issue. The US scored better (by comparison, at least) with 27 per cent of those surveyed admitting that they exposed themselves to this risk.
Remote workers feel less urgency to be vigilant in their online behavior, with 56 per cent stating that the internet is becoming safer, an increase of eight percentage points from last year. This “happy factor”, most pronounced in the world’s fastest-growing economies such as Brazil, India and China, is having some undesirable consequences.
Punters half know that they are safer behind a corporate system, but that doesn’t stop them from engaging in all manner of bad behaviour. As well as opening unsolicited emails and hijacking Wi-Fi connections, remote workers are in the habit of loaning out work computers to friends and family. Unsurprisingly they also use work computers for personal use, such as downloading music and visiting social networking sites. Worse still, from a security perspective, many are in the habit of accessing work files from personal devices that haven’t been screened by IT departments.
Cisco reckons the reasons why punters flout corporate security policies when working from home are largely psychological.
“While working at home, people tend to let their guard down more than they do at the office, so adhering to security policies doesn’t always intuitively seem applicable or as necessary in the private confines of one’s home,” Stewart said. “The blurring of the lines between work and home, and between business lives and personal lives, presents a growing challenge for businesses seeking to capitalise on the productivity benefits of the remote workforce.”
More than half of respondents (55 per cent) to the survey reckon that remote workers are becoming less diligent about online security, an increase of 11 percentage points over the last 12 months. As well as the US and the UK the survey, conducted by market research firm InsightExpress, involved quizzing punters in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, India, Australia, and Brazil. The sample countries were chosen to represent a diverse set of social and business cultures.
The number of remote workers is growing worldwide, with as many as 46.6m staffers expected to be spending at least one day working at home by 2011, according to estimates from analyst firm Gartner.
Cisco is calling for greater security diligence so that firms and individuals can enjoy the benefits of remote working without exposing their organisations to security risks. Security awareness and education are at least as important as technology in these efforts, Cisco notes. ®
*The reasons offered for squatting a neighbour’s wireless connection provide an insight into the thinking of remote workers. Answers offered in the survey included: “I needed it because I was in a bind”, “It’s more convenient than using my wireless connection”, “I can’t tell if I’m using my own or my neighbour’s wireless connection” and “My neighbour doesn’t know, so it’s OK”.
Source – The Register
Recently BT released a document via their website explaining Voice Over IP (VOIP) to its customers and made some stark predictions for the future as well as dispelling many myths about Voice Over IP.
Here are some extracts from their website.
They say -
VoIP take-up is growing rapidly and we expect to see almost half of small businesses in the UK using internet calling in the next year. BT is also investing £10 billion in its 21st Century Network (21CN) initiative, which will move the UK’straditional (PSTN) telephone network over to one that is entirely Internet Protocol (IP) based. The first PSTN customers moved over to 21CN in November 2006 and by 2012 all calls in the UK will be made over IP.
The majority of people first look at VoIP services because of the cost savings that are available, but this isn’t limited to calling other VoIP users. Many services offer reduced local and national call rates, along with capped prices for domestic, fixed-to-mobile and international calls.
One of the criticisms that has been leveled at VoIP services is that it is still a relatively new technology and voice quality isn’t quite as high as on conventional fixed-line telephone services. However, paid-for services from reputable suppliers are very much the same as fixed line and can be better than mobile reception. As with any new technology, in the early days VoIP services could be unreliable. However as the technology has matured, reliability has increased and is now at a level that is appropriate for business use.
VoIP services are not linked to a local exchange in the same way as traditional telephones. As a result, VoIP numbers do not have to be specific to a town or region, which gives companies the ability to choose the type of number they want to use, whether that is a geographic, VoIP (for example an 05 prefix) or national (for example an 0845 or 0800 number).
Extract from BT Article
by Barry Weaver Feb 2008
The number of malicious programs found online has reached an unprecedented high, say security firms. Reports vary but some estimates suggest there were five times as many variants of malicious programs in circulation in 2007 compared to 2006.
Security company Panda Software said it was getting more than 3,000 novel samples of so called malware every day.
Criminals pump out variants to fool anti-virus programs that work, in part, by spotting common characteristics.
Threat landscape
Security software testing organisation AV Test reported that it saw 5.49 million unique samples of malicious software in 2007 – five times more than the 972,606 it saw in 2006.
AV Test reached its total by analysing malicious programs and generating a digital fingerprint for each unique sample.
The organisation said the different ways malware can be packaged will mean some duplication in its figures, but the broad trend showed a steep rise.
The organisation uses the samples to test security programs to see how many they can spot and stop.
Panda Software said the number of malicious samples it received in 2007 was up ten fold on 2006. In a statement it said the rise represented a “malware epidemic”.
Finnish security firm F-Secure said it had seen a doubling in the number of pieces of malware it detected in 2007 compared to 2006.
Most of the malicious programs detected by these security organisations are aimed at the various versions of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
The vast majority of these unique malicious programs will be made up of elements from older viruses that have been scrambled to look fresh.
“It started about nine months ago, in early 2007, we saw massive surges of new variants,” said Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technology officer at anti-spyware firm Webroot.
“There are days when we see 1,000 or more new samples,” he said.
“It’s a low-effort high-frequency type threat,” he said. “There’s no completely ground-breaking new stuff out there.”
He added that hi-tech criminals were adopting several tactics to avoid being spotted by anti-virus programs which try to spot the “signature” of each malicious program they know about.
“Anti-virus relies on customers to submit samples,” said Mr Eschelbeck, “but with spyware you typically do not get samples because your customers do not know they are infected.”
Increasingly, security firms have turned to new techniques to combat the rise in malware variants. Some use heuristics, or rules of thumb, to spot programs that are similar rather than identical to the ones they have seen before.
Others are using behaviour blockers that shut down any program that shows malicious intent.
Feb 2007 – BBC
The government is to unveil new legislation that will force internet service providers to cut off people who illegally download music and movies, reports suggest.
Under the new legislation, reported in The Times, internet service providers will be legally required to take action against those downloading pirated materials. The new law will apparently work on a three strikes basis, with a first offence receiving a warning, a second offence a temporary ban, and a third resulting in a terminated internet contract. Apparently the government is also considering whether this information should be shared among the ISPs, which could effectively see certain users striken from the internet. The article goes on to claim that ISPs that fail to follow the guidelines will themselves be prosecuted. However, a number of sticking points remain in the scheme including the issue of who will be responsible for arbitrating disputed cases, for example, in cases of Wi-Fi piggybacking. The government has previously claimed that should ISPs not self regulate on the issue it would be willing to step in and take action, however, this is the first time details of a potential scheme have been released.
Speaking on the issue in the past ISPs have argued that they simply do not have the ability to track every file that passes along their network, while privacy advocates have slammed proposals to monitor internet traffic.
Feb 2008 – PC Pro
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